So this is an ancient topic, and mostly pointless now since I ended up rewriting the bot in ruby anyways due to stability issues... but I wanted to reply to this since I came across it again and it annnoyed me enough to respond to.
The answer to that is: you shouldn't care. You might see this as a "standalone app", but mIRC is not your application.
In this case, mIRC is intended as the IRC back end for the script, which in my case is the main program. I don't think ethics even enter into it, unless there's some odd clause in the license that prevents having multiple installs on the same computer. Are you seriously saying it's unethical to use a purchased program in a way the author didn't intend?
I can't stay in sync with your repository if I make changes to settings while using your script.
The whole installation method is that you do a portable install, and then clone my repo in on top of it.
Secondly, I am *well* aware of the the fact that touching the client in any way would modify the INI file. That's why I ended up sourcing a third party tool to make changes to the file just to get around this particular issue. (In short, use the tool to stash away any reasonable customizations, do a pull+merge, then reload or restart if necessary).
you need to be mindful of the fact that you are NOT in control of the client, you are merely writing a script that adds functionality to the program.
You need to be mindful of the fact that this is not a user script to add functionality. This is a set of scripts which represent a bot that happens to run on top of mIRC, not a script used by a client for enhancing their chat experience. In this particular instance, it's launched, the GUI is minimized and then ideally never touched again.
In any case, this is all irrelevant now. But I just wanted to clarify what my goal was here since this thread still comes up on google.
Thanks anyways